Thursday, October 13, 2005

.NET2.0 ObjectDataSource and BindingList<T> VS typed datasets

I am currently at a project where some VB6 and .NET1.1 WinForms applications are to be ported and upgraded to .NET2.0. The current architecture is layered and employs (custom) business entity objects modelled on the domain of the customer. The solution is distributed over several tiers, and the communications technology of the architecure (.NET remoting) is also up for review. In addition, it is a design goal to enable the solution to provide services and entity data to external systems, both within the company and to e.g. partners.

Yesterday some of the developers started to argue for replacing the existing business entity objects with typed datasets. Their main reason for this was to get "maximum" developer productivity through two-way WinForms data binding in the user controls. This is a typical way of thinking for developers that have worked mainly with databases and ASP.NET solutions. In addition, scrapping the domain entity objects would be a step in the wrong direction from 'domain driven design' (DDD) and from 'service orientation' enabling the solution. This discussion is not a new one, refer to this MSDN article by Dino Esposito for pros & cons of datasets vs business entity objects. I also recommend reading the articles referenced at the end of the 'Cutting Edge' article.Note how they all agree on that exposing datasets in a service is a bad idea..NET2.0 provides several new mechanisms aimed at bringing the ease of dataset binding to business entity objects, allowing the developers to use design time tools and wizards to bind their GUI to entity objects. The ObjectDataSource (BindingSource) and the generic BindingList<T> are the main enabling object binding mechanisms in .NET2.0. Note that it is possible to provide object binding also in .NET1.1 as shown in this MDSN article by Paul Ballard, but it will require more coding and will not give full design time support for setting up the binding.What you will find out is that the BindingList<T> has some 'last mile' problems when compared to the binding mechanisms provided by the DataView/DataSet combination. In our prototype/spike the lack of built-in implementation for sorting and filtering immediately surfaced. These methods are defined in the IBindingList interface, but is not implemented by BindingList<T>. A bit of googling led me to this blog entry and this GotDotNet workspace. Andrew Davey's BindingListView<T> provides a data bindable view for a BindingList, in the same way that a DataView provides a bindable view of a DataTable. This component implements much of the stuff described in Paul Ballard's article. One less argument for the typed dataset clan :-)Typed datasets still has the upper hand when it comes to batch updates, optimistic concurrency, etc, when compared to custom business entity objects and collections. What the solution might need is an ORM framework that handles all the object-to-database stuff (the DDD repository pattern). I might be in for a classic turf war with the dataset-all-the-way clansmen!